Get Better Email Marketing Results in East New York

East New York: Slow to Gentrify

Unlike so many other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, East New York has not experienced the rapid gentrification of its neighbors. Gentrification has been slow and uneven.

While there have been some improvements like the Gateway Center mall in the early 2000s and 2010s, the neighborhood has not seen the income and property value increase of other areas. If anything, both have been treading water.

What East New York may lack in material wealth, it makes up for in community involvement. 

Headline is the Key 

Over 50% of people will open an email if it has a compelling headline as reported by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Key to a Good Headline

We believe that there are three essential elements to a good headline:

• Conciseness. 
• Utility. 
• Urgency.

Headlines are very hard to write well because there is a lot of information to squeeze in a 55-60 characters. This is why we narrowed them down to 3.

Utility

Of the three, utility is the most important. Making it clear that this email is worth reading is job number 1.  If your title doesn’t make it clear to the reader what is in it for them, rewrite it. 

Many people can write the headline so the utility is clear but the headline is too long, which leads the next point.

Concise

This is where it gets even tougher - how to condense your utility in 3 or 4 words. This is where keywords can be helpful. People are searching every day for information about your topic, so you can leverage those searches to see which terms they use most often. They are generally a very good predictor of which words will work best.

Urgency

Now, we come to our last point, urgency. Of the hundreds of emails a person receives in a day, we need to convince them as to why they should read ours now. We’ve become so desensitized to “now”, “today”, etc. that they have lost their impact.

Real offers with deadlines do still work. Deals or other incentives or limited access to an event still deliver.    

Respect Your Reader’s Time

The last thing you want after creating a great headline to boost open rates is to lose them with poor design. 

Email design follows the same principles of web design.  Communication is messy, and design helps aid in getting our intended message across quickly and efficiently.

An email is an intrusion. We need to recognize this fact. Therefore, we need to make that intrusion as brief and clear as possible by sticking with one clear message.

We cover email design in great detail in our post on small business email marketing. We will just touch on the high points here.

Design Choices Can Help or Harm Communication

Using color remains more of an art than a science, even though we have studied it since the ancient Greeks.

The challenge with color is context. Some colors, such as blue/green, are seen as pleasing when in an environmental setting, but as disgusting when on bread as mold.

Therefore, the first thing we need to consider with color is context. The next is harmony. 

Color should enhance, not detract or compete with your message. Color used well can be attention grabbing, which used poorly can be overwhelming.

Tools like the color wheel can help. The color wheel is based on the harmonics of different wavelengths of light. Just like music, some notes sound better together, while others sound like noise.

Creating & Building an Email List

When building a list, the worst thing you can do is use SPAM like tactics. It can harm your credibility and damage your brand. However, it is good to be aware that others will and do, so it is alway important that we focus on our value.

There are two main tactics that we have seen work time and again.

1. Create an Amazing Incentive for your readers.
2. Have an Email Signup Form where people can easily see it.

As we mentioned, one of the beauties of email is its low cost However, there is a hidden cost, which is the caring and feeding of your list. 

How you go about list management depends on how much of the steps above you plan to do in house. 

As a small business owner, it is hard to dedicate the time to do all that is suggested. 

Full disclosure, ProStrategix is a full service digital marketing agency, so this is what we do. Therefore, it will come as no surprise that we advocate for the use of a knowledgeable 3rd party. 

That said, there are many software programs and marketing automation tools that can help manage your email marketing campaigns. You would have to invest the time and energy in writing and developing the emails, but the tools could manage the campaign.

Summary

In closing, I hope you see how these 3 email marketing email marketing hacks can help. To review:

1. Headline is Priority #1: Remember that ½ of the people will decide whether to open or delete based on 55 characters.
2. Respect Your Reader’s Time: Your reader has little time to spend on an email. Make sure that they feel their time was well spent.‍
3. Invest in Building Your Own List: Take the time to build a legitimate e-mail list. It can be slow, but it is the best approach in the long-run.

See more about Small Business Marketing in East New York. If you are more interest in the borough, you can see our Small Business Marketing in Brooklyn. If you want the full city, you can see our Small Business Marketing in NYC.